where we have almost made amends
by ellixian
Summary: What is this, House? What are we doing? she asked him once, quietly, her body curled against his, roses and lavendar and rain soaked into his pillows and sheets and skin.


- - - - - 

"What is this, House? What are we doing?" she asked him once, quietly, her body curled against his, roses and lavendar and rain soaked into his pillows and sheets and skin. Her fingers are twined with his, still, and he parts her hair and presses a kiss to the nape of her neck, as gently as he knows how, because he doesn't know what to tell her.

- - - - -

"Make yourself useful, House - which one should I wear?"

She turns and holds up two evening dresses that, to him, look identical. "They're dresses, Cuddy," he says, infusing the three words with as much sarcastic disdain as he can muster. But he adds, for good measure, "I'd have lurid, depraved sex fantasies about you in either one, if that helps."

"When do you not?" she tells him tartly, in that throaty come-hither voice of hers, and he could swear a part of his anatomy just jumped to attention as she vanishes into the bathroom.

With Cuddy, he thinks, with whatever this was between them, on the good days like today and the bad days like yesterday and the other days in between, everything was still a question.

It's not the way it was with Stacy. By the end, the questions had all but died, the ones he couldn't bring himself to ask about why she was crying or smoking or coming home late, the ones that had gradually died on her lips about how much it hurt or could she help or did he need anything from her.

He had known, even at the time, as the anger at her betrayal still boiled fresh in his throat and stomach and thigh, that he had stopped deserving Stacy a long time ago. So he hurt her and yelled at her and made her cry until she broke, and left him.

Cuddy emerges, a swirl of perfume and midnight blue silk, and she drops a kiss on his head.

He watches as she leaves to check on Liam, and he knows that he has hurt her and yelled at her and made her cry too.

What he doesn't know is if he ever deserved her in the first place.

- - - - -

"Is it worse than usual?" she had asked softly, and for a moment, he hated her, hated that she had somehow come to always know just when it went from merely unbearable to unvarnished torture, and the fact that he would never feel that she should have to wage this battle with him.

"No," he had only just managed to bite out against the pain that threatened to leak into his voice, "Its your insatiable sex drive, Cuddy. You're wearing me out. I'll see you tomorrow."

Now, he perches on the edge of his bed, both hands massaging, tearing at the broken flesh of his thigh, and he feels the urge to punch something, anything, so hard that it would break into a million pieces too small to fix.

The morphine is already next to him, a needle and a small bottle glistening with the promise of relief.

But yet he waits, and hopes, and even prays - for what are the desperate pleas he makes to no one in particular for the Vicodin to kick in, but prayer?

Later, he blinks blearily past the mist that coats his eyes, enough to make out the sharp, worried lines of her face and the startling sea-blue of her eyes, and he can't be certain if the first words he said to her had been her name or i'm sorry, but she lays a cool cloth against his forehead and holds his hand until he falls asleep again.

- - - - -

"Why the hell does it bug you so much, House?"

He has always known that she is magnificent in her fury, and he suddenly remembers a day almost thirty years ago now, when she snapped at him in almost the same way, her eyes flashing blue lightning, blood roses in her cheeks. She had been railing at him for being stupid enough to get kicked out of Johns Hopkins, and he had been too drunk to do anything much except leer at her and pass out on the floor.

"Are you just annoyed that I managed to do something without you finding out first? Because it turns out your detective skills stink and paying off the janitor everyday so you can look through my trash still didn't give you a hint?"

"Prospective mommies shouldn't be liars," he tells her, meanly, "I figured you'd given up on the in vitro but you didn't tell me that you're already halfway to picking some random kid off the street and..."

"Shut up, House," she warns him, and usually he never lets this stop him, but there are acid words still on her tongue, rage threaded through every bone of her body, and lines of aching, bitter loss cut into her face.

She glares at him for a few moments, but just as quickly as her anger came, her face softens, her jaw unclenches, and he's startled when she puts her hand on his arm.

"Is it because I asked Wilson for a reference instead of you?"

He doesn't know what to say, except that he has no right to be angry because he remembers the time he told her to find someone she trusted, someone she liked, and he knows she's better off if it isn't him.

- - - - -

"Do you like my mommy, Uncle House?"

Liam brandishes a tiny red toy car in the air as he cocks his head, studying House. He is a bonny, healthy boy, blonde and blue-eyed and affectionate, everything Cuddy deserves but has had to fight far too many battles for.

"Your mommy makes me do terrible, wicked things, Midget. Like clinic duty. I'll buy you a new train set if you tell her she's working me too hard."

Liam chuckles, then frowns. "Does that mean no?"

House smiles. Liam is whip-smart, stubborn, and inquisitive - in every way but genetically, Cuddy's son right through.

"It's complicated," he replies, at last. "When she gives me extra clinic hours, I don't like her very much. You'll know what I mean when she grounds you for the first time."

Again, the little boy laughs, a burst of sunshine on a summer afternoon.

"Mommy told me she likes you, Uncle House," Liam informs him gravely, "because you eat everything she cooks and I should too."

"Well, Liam," he says, just as gravely, "I guess I'll take whatever I can get."

- - - - -

"My place tonight?"

There have been days when she has seen the faraway look in his eyes, the mark of a new case or the shadow of a dark, broken memory, and though she knows better, has tried to reach out to him anyway.

Sometimes, he has told her no out of pure, desperate need, an eagerness to wall himself off from the world so he can run his fingers across the ivory-cool keys of his piano, or soak in the tub until the water runs almost to ice and numbs, if only for an instant, the flames that lick through his thigh.

But there are other times when he has forced himself to say no, limping home alone with the scars of the day burning fresh, just to prove that whatever they've fallen into isn't his entire life.

He will never admit that, those nights, he finds himself in bed, the sheets curled around his waist a poor substitute for the weight and warmth of her body, half-dreaming of blossoms in a summer storm.

- - - - -

"Do you want to hold him?"

She smiles, a smile full of love and hope, not at him, but at the slumbering baby tucked safely in her arms.

Wilson nudges him in the ribs. "House, the longer you stare, the harder it'll be for you to hold the kid when it's, like, 17 years old and six feet tall."

"Can't blame me for being distracted by the royal funbags," he smirks on auto-pilot. "Cuddy, allow me to state for the record that it's not too late for me to find religion - adopting the midget means those puppies will stay just the way God intended."

"Any other day, House, and I'd triple your clinic hours for that," she laughs, as she allows him to take Liam from her. "But I'm feeling mysteriously magnanimous today."

She leans over, and as she presses a gentle kiss to the baby's forehead, he suddenly feels sorry for the children Cuddy had tried and failed to have.

It probably wouldn't have made much of a difference, he reasons, even if he had offered to help. None of her in vitro implantations had worked, and he had no good reason to expect his swimmers to be any more persistent or capable than those of all the donors she had already tried.

But, every once in a while, on the off chance that it might have worked, at the possibility that it could have meant something more even if it had failed, there's a part of him that still wishes he could have said 'yes'.

Except it was the one question she had never asked him.

- - - - -

"Can you stay?"

She doesn't look at him, when she asks him this for the first time.

For weeks now, he has followed her home, fallen with her onto her bed or couch in a tangle of limbs, hastily-shed clothes and fierce, desperate kisses. He has held her to him until she has complained of bruises, thrust into her while murmuring swear words that, for them, might too easily have passed for promises.

It was nothing, the first time, and nothing, the second. No doubt she had been lonely, even with Liam's gurgles filling the rooms of her house, and he had been in pain, a constant as immutable as time. But neither of them could quite remember how or why it all started except that it wasn't supposed to be anything.

He just knew he had kissed her. Or she had kissed him. And somehow it had become harder to stop than to just... keep going.

But, whenever the baby's muffled cries drifted into the room, as they invariably did, he had always, dutifully, rolled over, put on the clothes scattered like a trail of bread crumbs across her floor, and traced the path between her home and his with something like an ache lodged just beneath his ribs.

She had never asked him to stay.

So, today, he doesn't answer her, doesn't say anything, just pulls her into him, spreading his fingers across her stomach so he can feel it as her breathing grows deep and even.

- - - - -

"House, please. Can you watch him for a couple of hours?"

He can hear the tears she refuses to shed weighing her voice down, and he imagines her on the other end of the line, packing her clothes and creams and grief into the suitcase she'll take to the funeral.

He doesn't answer right away, because there are times that he knows not to say the first thing that comes to mind, and he doesn't want to make her cry any more than he can help.

"Wilson's still at that conference," she tells him, a note of quiet desperation in every word. "I couldn't get him on the phone, but I'll call again, and he'll come get Liam when he's done, but please. House. I have to go now and I can't take Liam with me."

"It's a sad state of affairs in the Cuddy household when you have two emergency babysitters and one of them is me," he finally tells her, and is glad that this somehow manages to elicit a shaky laugh from the depths of her sorrow. "I'll be there. Forget Wilson. You know, despite my best efforts, I haven't yet succeeded in getting my license revoked. Which means I'm technically still a doctor and I've taken care of worse."

"Thank you," she says, simply.

"I'm sorry," he says, and he means about everything, before he adds, "about your mom."

- - - - -

"Penny for your thoughts?" she asks him one summer evening, when they're out on her porch after she made him dinner and he's trying to avoid doing the dishes.  
As she holds their hands up against the fading sunlight, and paints lazy, aimless squiggles across his palm, he realises - out of nowhere, or perhaps everywhere - he still doesn't quite know what they have, or what he's done to deserve this moment.

He has broken her heart at least a dozen times over the years, sometimes with a malice that still surprises him when he thinks of it. She has on occasion done her best to return the favour, and succeeded more times than he would have thought possible - especially since he hadn't thought he had much of a heart left to give her by the time Stacy was done with it.

They have grown old now, lost friends and waged battles against diseases and life and, yes, of course, pain. They have argued and hated and fought and loved and hurt each other the only way they knew how.

"Just wondering how we got here," he says, as he tightens his hold on her and breathes her in, after all these years still a heady mix of roses and lavendar and rain.

"Just be glad we did," she replies, and kisses him.


End file.
